The Republican tax bill got worse: now the top 1% gets 83% of the gains

By 2027, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — would pay more in taxes under the tax bill agreed to by House and Senate Republicans, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds. That year, 82.8 percent of the bill’s benefit would go to the top 1 percent, up from 62.1 under the Senate bill.

And even in the first years of the bill’s implementation, when it’s an across-the-board tax cut, the benefits of the law would be heavily concentrated among the upper-middle and upper-class Americans, with nearly two-thirds of the benefit going to the richest fifth of Americans in 2018.

The paper is the first rigorous analysis of who wins and loses under the bill as agreed to in conference committee. House and Senate negotiators agreed to a number of changes in the bill, most notably lowering the top income tax rate for individuals to 37 percent from its current level of 39.6 percent. The analysis does not include an additional cost of the legislation: its repeal of the individual mandate, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates could cause as many as 13 million fewer people to have health insurance, reducing federal spending for poor and middle-class Americans’ health insurance by $338 billion over 10 years. That worsens the bill’s distribution for the poor and middle class.

Almost all provisions of the bill, with the exception of the reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, are temporary, expiring at the end of 2025. One exception is the adoption of a new slower-growing inflation measure to adjust tax brackets, a change that effectively raises taxes over time and helps pay for the permanent corporate rate cut. Since corporate rate cuts mostly help Americans rich enough to own stock, that means that in 2027, poor and middle-class Americans would see a very mild tax increase on average: